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Matt Barrett.NetI wanted MattBarrett.com but it was taken. It was not even taken by another Matt Barrett but by someone who thinks I am famous enough to want to buy my domain name and sell it back to me for a million dollars. It's called cyber-squatting. So I e-mailed this person and they never responded. I suppose that means that I am not famous enough so that he can sell my name for a million dollars and he is going to wait until I get more famous. So until I make enough money to buy the domain mattbarrett.com I am using mattbarrett.net as a sort of index for people to find my travel websites and some of the other projects I am involved in. By the way that is my daughter Amarandi in the photo. She is now 19 years old and I am still not famous enough to buy mattbarrett.com for a million dollars. So most likely I will be mattbarrett.net forever. Well at least it is not mattbarrett.info or mattbarrett.tv so things could be worse. If you have any questions you can e-mail me at matt@greecetravel.com |
Index of Matt's Sites |
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Lesvos: More Than Just Another Greek Island:
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 This is the funniest book about traveling in Greece ever written. Just ask all my friends, someof whom stopped speaking to me after they recognized themselves in my book. That's the trouble when your humor is brutally
honest. But they will forgive me. Maybe at about the same time as I get the million dollars to buy Mattbarrett.com. In the meantime since you don't know me personally and are probably not in the book you have nothing to lose by reading it and everything to gain because besides being amusing and entertaining it also contains lots of helpful information about Greece. But having read a lot of other travel journals I would say this is the funniest. See
Spearfishing in Skatahori |
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 I began this website as an introduction to Greek history that I could include in my guides for people who knew nothing about Greek history. As I wrote it, the history got longer and longer with more and more photos, music and archival material so that it began to take on a life of its own. It is probably one of the few histories of Greece that
begins with pre-history and goes to the present-day. Well maybe not the present day since things now are happening so quickly I can't even keep up with it. But if you want to know about Greek history this is a good place to begin. See www.ahistoryofgreece.com |
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AMARANDI BARRETT'S GREECE 4 KIDS  My daughter Amarandi has put together her own travel guide to Greece called GREECEJUST FOR KIDS. If you are thinking of going to Greece and you have kids that are not yet as enthused as you are
about the prospects of a vacation thousands of miles away in a land they have never been to and maybe not even
heard of, send them here. Amarandi did most of the writing from the age of 8 until 12 and then she sort of lost interest in it. She is nineteen and in university now but for thousands of children around the world who use her site Amarandi is still around 12 years old and she still gets e-mail from children who want to be her pen pal. You can see her website at www.greece4kids.com |
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 First of all the reason I am famous enough for someone to buy my domain name andsell it back to me is not because I am a musician, even though I think that is what I should have been famous for.
But after years of playing in small clubs....well mostly one small club called the Cave in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
I gave it up. Yes the crowds were getting smaller and those that came to the bar were more intent upon watching
whatever was on TV. But can you blame them? Who wants to see a fat, bald guy in his fifties singing about the girlfriends he had
when he was in his twenties and was skinny, handsome and had hair? But my music was pretty good, especially if you like hard-edged pop. And some of the writing is pretty funny too. See www.mattbarrett.net/music |
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 I have taken thousands of photos of Greece. I think I was up to about 60,000 last time I checked. When you take that many photos, no matter how bad a photographer you are, you are going to come up with some winners. So I have put the best ones together along with the slides of Greece my father took between 1963 and 1974. I think altogether they create a pretty
inspiring portrait of Greece and if there is anyone you want to convince to go there with you this is a good place to send them. If you have a few free hours yourself and want to browse through them go to www.greecetravel.com/photos |
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The island of Lesvos, in the North Aegean is about ten kilometers off the coast of Turkey and is one of the most beautiful and interesting islands in Greece. It could be a country all it's own were it not so culturally tied to the Greek mainland. It has some of the best beaches in Greece and probably the freshest and most inexpensive seafood in Greece and they
claim the best olive oil in Greece. It is also the bird-watching capital of southern Europe and in spring the migrating birds and wildflowers make it seem like paradise. People thought it odd that I would devote so much effort to making a website for one island but fifteen years later I have received hundreds of e-mails from people who used my advice and visited an island they had never heard of, and loved it. Many go back every year now. See 
This is a website I did wth my friend Stephen Papadopoulos, a Greek-American poet who splits time between Paris and Athens. I discovered a great way to break up the 9 hour flight from NY to Athens was to spend several days in Paris. While this site is not as popular as my Greece websites there is a lot of good information, some nice photos and some excellent
travel writing, mostly by Stephen though each time I go and add a little more of my writing and my photos. It may
not be the best guide to Paris but it is free and it is good enough and it covers the basics. After your tenth trip or so you might want to move on to something more complete but if this is your first trip you will never know that I don't know everything. 
I began this site when I went to the beach and tried out a new digital camera. The photos looked pretty good so I made a page for them and then thought that since I spend much of the year in North carolina, why not make a travel guide for the state like my Greece Travel Guides. The first thing I did was write about the music of North Carolina and most people
say that this is the best part of my guide, but if you want to visit North carolina you may find the whole thing pretty
useful. Actually North Carolina is the 6th most popular tourist destination in the USA and has islands and mountains, like Greece, though not together, being on opposite sides of the state. But the roads are better than in Greece. In fact they are probably the best in the USA. 
Once I finally visited Istanbul, Turkey I had to ask myself what took me so long. Istanbul was one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to and the people were extraordinarily nice. So of course I had to put together a website about it and to help me with the rest of Turkey I solicited the help of some very wise friends who know the country way
better than I do. But this site should continue to grow as I plan to return there as often as possible. You can see my Guide to Turkey at 
Several years ago I put together this website on Greek Food, comprised mainly (completely actually) of articles about food from my Greece Travel Guide. The plan was to have one central location that had all my information about Greek food. But as the site seemed to gain in popularity I began to feel guilty about how much of the information on the
site could also be found on other pages of my website. Sort of like turning in the same book report or term paper year after year because you have different teachers or switch schools. So I made up my mind that one day I was going to make this website a guide to Greek food that would stand on its own. But what do I know about Greek food besides how to eat it? As it turns out: alot. See 